Jordan Furlong is a strategic consultant and analyst who forecasts the impact of the changing legal market on lawyers, law firms and legal organizations.

Why lawyers don’t innovate

“How can I get my lawyers to change?” This might be the question I hear most frequently from managing partners and law firm CEOs who are trying to help their organizations innovate and adapt to the new marketplace, but who are frustrated by the fierce resistance they encounter. The conventional culprit is lawyers’ bullheaded refusal to countenance any sort of change, driven both by an inherent attachment to the status quo and by the comfortable livelihoods that many lawyers make and see no need to disturb.

But that’s only part of the story. The main problem with the question above is simple: You can’t make people change. You can’t really make people do anything, short of using a weapon, a court order, or post-hypnotic suggestion. Human behaviour is ridiculously complicated and, based on Daniel Kahneman’s work at least, driven to an alarming extent by unconscious habits and urges.

People do what they feel like doing, and most lawyers feel like doing today what they did yesterday. David Maister’s final book, Strategy And The Fat Smoker, made this point very clearly: No matter how sensible and positive a particular change might be, lawyers (like everyone else) will change only if theywant to change. And very rarely do they want to do that.

So how can law firms evolve — specifically, how can they innovate and reconfigure and adapt to new circumstances — when their owners, managers and workers don’t wish to do so? Law firm innovation is clearly possible — there are plenty of examples out there to inspire us — so it can be done; but how?

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A good place to start is a terrific article published in a recent edition of The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, the medical doctor whose book The Checklist Manifestoshould be required reading for all managing partners. Gawande’s magazine article, “Slow Ideas,” explores the complex and seemingly random nature of innovation, using examples from the history of medical advancements. Surgical anaesthesia and antiseptics (Listerism) were both discovered in the 19th century, for example; but while the former caught on almost immediately, the latter struggled to gain acceptance for decades. Why? Gawande suggests a couple of reasons:

First, one combatted a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combatted an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors. Anesthesia changed surgery from a brutal, time-pressured assault on a shrieking patient to a quiet, considered procedure. Listerism, by contrast, required the operator to work in a shower of carbolic acid. Even low dilutions burned the surgeons’ hands. You can imagine why Lister’s crusade might have been a tough sell.

That second reason certainly resonates in the legal market. Courthouse security, to draw a parallel, is pretty airtight, because failing to ensure it would threaten judges, lawyers and litigants alike. But our failure to ensure access to justice continues to be a scourge, in no small part because although it’s terrible for members of the public, it’s not really much of a problem for lawyers at all.

But difficulties around innovation aren’t restricted to doctors and lawyers; they’re universal. It’s not that we don’t know how to make a process better, and it not that the people in charge of a process don’t want things to be better. It’s that getting people to do things differently, in order to achieve that better outcome, is incredibly hard.

Consider the three most common methods cited by Gawande that are traditionally used to change behaviour:

1. Politeness: You ask people nicely to do things differently. But only some do, and not all the time, and the whole process collapses if the kindness of others is absent or withdrawn. Asking lawyers nicely to change the way they do business does not have a long and notable record of success.

2. Force: You punish people for failing to do things differently. But if the threat of force outweighs the rewards of the job (or if people have other options), they’ll quit rather than risk the penalty. In the law firm context, lawyers threatened with penalties take their books of business across the street to rival firms.

3. Incentives: You provide money or other rewards to motivate people to do things differently. But as any managing partner will tell you, this cure is often worse than the cause. What metrics do you choose? How do you track compliance? How do you keep the system from being gamed? Worst of all, how do you actually allocate the rewards among numerous participants? Veterans of partner compensation committees know these questions all too well.

Politeness, force, and incentives constitute 99% of the methods used in law firms to try to effect change and encourage innovation. Few of these efforts succeed, and many of those successes prove to be only temporary. But there’s another, better way identified by Gawande: much simpler, much easier to understand, and much easier to train people to do. The only problem, from lawyers’ perspective, is that it requires them to do something most of them don’t like. It requires them to take enough time and care to talk with each other and build trust with each other — and through these efforts, to change “the way we do things around here.”

[N]either penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. … To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way. …

Technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

This is something that salespeople understand well. I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors — who are notoriously stubborn — to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become, “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change. [Emphasis added]

People change their behaviours when encouraged to do so by someone who has earned their friendship and trust. That’s all. It’s just that simple — but in many law firms, it’s also just that difficult.

Law firms have become extremely low-trust workplaces, and the larger and more diffuse the firm, the lower the trust.

National and global firms are overflowing with “partners” who have never even spoken to each other, and never will.

Even in smaller firms, lawyers fight each other for origination and billing credit in a zero-sum game where every gain is a “partner’s” loss.

As client business continues to shrink, the growing threat of de-equitization hangs over every seat at the partnership table, save those few within the inner circle of management — and the skulduggery employed to remove seats from some of these tables would impress a Machiavellian prince.

This cultural crisis in traditional law firms is full-blown, and I don’t see any way for it to end happily. But even in well-adjusted law firms, you’ll still find a certain reluctance among many lawyers to develop with their colleagues the kind of friendship and trust that makes possible the innovations Gawande describes. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons:

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Higher productivity expectations: Lawyers at many firms are under constantly rising pressure to bill hours and justify their continued presence on the roster; this priority shoves aside more pedestrian matters such as conversations with colleagues (the non-billable kind, anyway).

Increased lawyer mobility: Why invest time and effort building relationships with colleagues who could be competitors tomorrow? Why open up to someone who could eventually exploit the vulnerabilities you provide them?

Lawyers’ personal conservatism: (In other contexts, it would be called shyness), rooted in our risk-averse nature: trust is built by extending confidence before it’s been fully earned, a leap of faith that helps grow a relationship — but lawyers have a near-pathological aversion to risk, and risk is at the heart of trust.

Lawyers’ antisocial tendencies: David Maister tells another story, of a law firm whose partners asked him to build a sort of automatic compensation system; when he told them that successful compensation systems were personal and were built on trust, they replied, “But we don’t want to have to trust each other; that’s why we want the system.”

So when managing partners ask me, “How can I get my lawyers to change?” I have to respond: You can’t make your lawyers do anything they don’t want to do. They’ll do something only if they decide they want to do it, and they’ll want to do it if encouraged by those they like, respect and trust. In a number of law firms, I’m sorry to report, building a culture of “like, respect and trust” among lawyers can be considerably more difficult than getting lawyers to adopt a new innovation. It requires a level of effort and openness and generosity that many lawyers these days feel they can’t afford. But I’m coming to think it’s the key to successful, long-term, sustainable law firm innovation. And it can be done.

Gawande ends his article by relating the story of a trainer in India trying to get a rural birth-delivery nurse to adopt simple yet critical steps to increase newborns’ odds of survival and good health. It took numerous visits and the slow establishment of a friendship between the two professionals before the nurse’s behaviours began to change. Gawande later interviewed the nurse.

“Why did you listen to her?” I asked. “She had only a fraction of your experience.”

In the beginning, she didn’t, the nurse admitted. “The first day she came, I felt the workload on my head was increasing.” From the second time, however, the nurse began feeling better about the visits. She even began looking forward to them.

“Why?” I asked.

All the nurse could think to say was, “She was nice.”

“She was nice?”

“She smiled a lot.”

“That was it?”

“It wasn’t like talking to someone who was trying to find mistakes,” she said. “It was like talking to a friend.”

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.

10 Responses to “Why lawyers don’t innovate”

I love this article, especially the bit about the “seven touches.” Change is very difficult, and unfortunately sometimes its’s just impossible. I will take gentle exception to your comment that you can “make” someone change through post-hypnotic suggestion. While hypnosis can be an extremely effective way to change behavior, no-one does anything they don’t already want to do as a result of post-hypnotic suggestion. If it were otherwise, hypnosis would be very dangerous. Thank you for your thoughful and valuable articles, I look forward to the next one.

Instead of trying to get their organizations to innovate, Law Firm CEO’s should work to convince the partners to allow invest in law related startups. A large majority of VC’s and angels are not interested in investing in law related startups. They foresee significant community resistance to both technology adoption and entry into the legal industry by incumbents. They also don’t see many exit avenues. According to Clayton Christiansen disruptive innovations work best when they are developed outside of incumbent organizations, i.e. startups.

Thus instead of trying to reinvent their organizations they should benefit from entrepreneurs reinventing the practice of law. One example of this is DLA Piper investing in Riverview Law. Riverview Law happens to be one of the fastest growing new law firms in the world right now, so the investment is likely paying off. Clearly demand for legal services provided in the traditional way at traditional prices is declining. To grow the firms need to learn to invest their money, rather than their time and expertise. There are significant growth opportunities out there, far better than the projected growth of law firm revenues. Legalzoom is still a private company but the IPO will likely come sometime soon. Instead of complaining about Legalzoom Lawfirms should be fighting to get a steak in it before the IPO. Or they could look at even newer companies like, Lawpivot, Upcounsel, Rocketlawyer, Lawdingo, and the many other sites which have managed to find investors in this difficult space. Why was it Thomas Reuters who purchased Pangea3 and not one of the lawfirms of Biglaw? That was a serious opportunity missed but one that could still be corrected. If Biglaw starts purchasing these startups maybe VC’s will start to be more interested in this space and we can finally start to see a wave of innovation come forth into this sector.

There is an additional reason why lawyers in law firms don’t innovate. (We are seeing some innovation today by solos and by lawyers who have left their firms to pursue their ideas.) David Maister captured it well in his article years ago titled “Are Law Firms Manageable?” Maister said:
“In a room full of lawyers, any idea, no matter how brilliant, will be instantly attacked. Lawyers are expert loophole finders, trained to find counterexamples of or exceptions to any proposition. Accordingly, within a short time, most ideas, no matter who initiates them, will be destroyed, dismissed, or postponed for future examination.”

On the subject of change, I recalled a quote by the famous psychiatrist R. D. Laing. I think he once said, “People don’t change until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing.”

I haven’t been able to verify that quote today, but I did find another one by Laing: “There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.” http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/r_d_laing.html#YGFGAiMkckMRhyuW.99
As law firm “pain of not changing” mounts, perhaps a few innovators will stop trying to avoid the pain and lead the way to a new model.

Change aka the future is not about content and technology it is about trust and relationships. This is why lawyers struggle with innovation…they are not that good with trust and relationships, (although being lawyers they like to think they are).

Most innovation, at least initially, is a bit of a punt so that’s when you need trust and relationships. In fairness to lawyers that is a two way thing and a generation of over promising and under delivering vendors has not helped the situation.

Change is also held back by the classic three faults of the incumbent supplier (of any industry).

They are; fear, ignorance and arrogance. You could write a whole separate post on each of those alone.

One other change agent to add; pain.

The pain of failure, the pain of collapse etc. When that agent kicks in lawyers will rush to innovate.

Your article was of sufficient effect as to incite Ann Ford of DLA Piper to post it to the Disruptive Innovation Group at LinkedIn (http://lnkd.in/r3jBFb).[BCReed, this may be something you’d be interested in.]

If you read the ensuing response there, you’ll see that having everyone ‘get along’/collaborate/treat their customers well, will not stem the tide. Fixed cost legal service won’t either. When 67% of the market consciously avoids use of your product and 51% believe that it constitutes a public hazard (http://bit.ly/1dujEe4), you can be certain that non-parallel alternatives will be sought.

Data on alternatives (http://bit.ly/19Kx3jb) convey that:
81% of 159 Fortune 500 companies polled actively use ADR techniques, and
850 corporations, 2,800 corporate subsidiaries, and 1,500 law firms have already signed the Center for Public Resources’ Policy Statement on Alternatives to Litigation

And I don’t think I need to tell anyone here about the popularity ratings of lawyers and their profession. (http://bit.ly/1d3sxO4)

There are no records of organizations to date with these kinds of opt out numbers where reform was able to salvage the incumbent industry. I daresay that Jon Busby’s intuition of any effort at this point being to little too late is likely accurate.

What can lawyers do then? If I were advising a lawyer my advice would be to either get on the train or off the train to avoid being run over by it, because it is with certainty, well on its way.

(BCReed I think you’ll appreciate this…) While it is the case that Christensen advises incumbents who want to be Disruptive to dispatch an independent unit to that objective – he also notes that the success rate of parent firms launching Disruptive Innovation is truly minimal at best. Disruption happens best from the outside – and it starts with something Christensen calls the job2Bdone.

I can elaborate further, but I suspect many here aren’t of the disposition to learn about Disruptive Innovation at this moment, so you have our address on LinkedIn – feel free to join us in the discussion to ask for elaboration – and we will.

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Edge International

Jordan Furlong is a Partner with Edge International. One of the world's leading management consultancies, Edge has been providing strategic planning to law firms for more than 30 years. Learn more about Edge.

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Jordan Furlong is a Senior Consultant with Stem Legal and leads its Content Marketing service. Stem provides online profile and business development services for law firms in the U.S. and Canada. Learn more about Stem.